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The Marketing/Media Ecology In an Environment of

Mobile, Programmatic, and the Cloud
Charles Warner

The media are integral elements of America’s economy and of the marketing process that
is vital to that economy’s vigor. Consumer demand is what drives the economy, and it is
marketing and advertising that fuel consumer demand. Advertising is a major component
of marketing, and it is through the media that consumers receive advertising messages
about products and services. If any one of the three elements (marketing, advertising,
and the media) is not healthy, the other two cannot thrive. This chapter will examine the
interdependent relationships among marketing, advertising, and the media.

What Is Marketing?

In his influential book, The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker, “the Father of
Modern Management,” presented and answered a series of simple, straightforward
questions. He asked, “What is a business?” The most common answer, “An organization
to make a profit,” is not only false; it is also irrelevant to Drucker. If we want to know
what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. “There is only one valid definition
of business purpose: to create a customer,” Drucker wrote.
Drucker pointed out that businesses create markets for products and services:
“There may have been no want at all until business action created it – by advertising, by
salesmanship, or by inventing something new. In every case it is a business action that
creates a customer.” Furthermore, he said, “What a business thinks it produces is not of
first importance –especially not to the future of the business and to its success.” “What
the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers ‘value,’ is decisive – it determines
what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.” Finally, Drucker said,
“Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two – and only
these two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.”i
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Notice that Drucker did not mention production, manufacturing, or distribution,

but only customers. That is what marketing is – a customer-focused business approach.
A production-oriented business produces goods and then tries to sell them; a customer-
oriented business produces goods that it knows will sell based on customer research or
insights, not what might sell.
Another leading theorist, former Harvard Business School Professor Theodore
Levitt, wrote an article in 1960 titled “Marketing Myopia” that is perhaps the most
influential single article on marketing ever published. Levitt claims that the railroads
went out of business “not because the need [for passenger and freight transportation] was
filled by others ... but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let
others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the
railroad business rather than in the transportation business.”ii In other words, they failed
because they did not know how to create a customer; they were not marketing-oriented.
Where would makers of buggy whips be today if they had decided they were in the
vehicle acceleration business or in the transportation accessory business instead of being
in the buggy whip business?
Levitt cited the problems Detroit’s car manufacturers were having in 1960 and
would have in the future – they were too production oriented. When American
automobile makers researched the needs of their customers, they merely found out
customers’ preferences among existing products. Japanese automobile makers did the
right research in the 1970s and gave these customers what they really wanted and still are
doing so today, as evidenced by the fact that Toyota has become the world’s number-one
car manufacturer.
As a result of the customer-oriented, marketing approach espoused by Drucker,
Levitt, and other leading management and business writers, many companies asked
themselves the question, “What business are we in?” and subsequently changed their
direction. They began to have a heightened sensitivity to customers and began to change
the old attitude of, “Let’s produce this product because we’ve discovered how to make
it.”
In today’s economy the customer rules and any company that does not put their
customers on a pedestal, wow them, and make raving fans of them will disappear from
the business landscape as fast as so many of the dot.coms did in 2000.
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Some Brief Economic History

From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth century,
America had little or no mass-production capability. People devoted their time to
producing agricultural goods, building manufacturing capacity, and developing
commerce. They concentrated on inventing and manufacturing products. It was the era
of production.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the population had spread out from the
East Coast, manufacturing had become efficient, and surpluses had developed. The basic
problem shifted from one of production to one of distribution – getting the plentiful
goods to people. Thus, in response to the new challenge, businesses developed new
distribution systems: mail-order houses (the beginning of Sears, Roebuck and Company),
chain stores, wholesalers and distributors, and department stores. It was the era of
distribution.
When the 1920s came roaring in, the problem changed from one of supply to one
of demand. Mass production and mass distribution were in place and an abundance of
goods was produced and distributed. The problem now was to convince consumers to
buy what was available. Enter the era of selling, as businesses attempted to create a
demand for the products they had produced and distributed with more intensive selling
techniques and advertising. Manufacturers made deceptive and extravagant promises
about products, and high-pressure selling tactics were common, especially during the
Depression in the 1930s as businesses became more desperate to sell their products.
After World War II, businesses had no trouble selling whatever they made.
Consumers released their pent-up demand for goods built up during the years when
manufacturing capacity was directed toward supplying the war effort. However, by the
1950s, consumers were beginning to be particular and to demand more choices; they
wanted what they wanted, not what manufacturers happened to want to produce. The era
of marketing had begun. Those businesses, such as Kellogg and Proctor and Gamble
(P&G), that recognized the shift in consumer attitudes adopted consumer-driven
approach and survived; those that did not, such as the Pennsylvania Railroad,
disappeared.
As has been widely reported, since the late 1990s we have entered the era of
information. Those businesses that can provide, distribute, organize, access, aggregate,
and create information and data are the ones that are growing rapidly. Google is an
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information era company that by creating popular search technology in mid-2017 had
more than twice the market capitalization than older production-oriented companies such
as General Motors and General Electric combined. The Internet is the most tangible
manifestation of the era of information and has become the ultimate distribution channel
for information and, thus, has become an integral part of virtually all companies’
marketing efforts.
In 2007 the growth trajectory of the era of information veered in a new direction
because of three innovations: (1) the smartphone, (2) programmatic trading, and (3) the
cloud. These innovations drove the Internet from being desktop, PC dominated to being
mobile, smartphone dominated when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 9 at
Apple’s Macworld Conference and Expo. The iPhone went on to fuel Apple’s rise to
becoming the most valuable company in the world in 2012.
Also, 2007 was the year that the first real-time bidding (RTB) by Right Media
occurred that “allowed advertisers to know in advance exactly whom they are presenting
to and on exactly which site it will appear and at what time.”iii The ability to address
specific individuals rather than broad audiences created the rapid growth of
programmatic trading that has irrevocably changed media buying and selling practices
(See Appendix A: Programmatic Media and Marketing for more detailed information
about RTB, programmatic, and automation).
The third innovation was the growth of the cloud and cloud computing that
allowed consumers and businesses to store and manipulate vast amounts of information
in the cloud in milliseconds at very low costs. Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI)
had arrived.

The Marketing Concept

The fundamental concept underlying marketing is that of consumer orientation; however,

just because a business is consumer oriented doesn't automatically ensure its competitive
survival. Two other ideas must accompany consumer orientation for the marketing
concept to be complete: profit and internal organization.
To continue to be sensitive to consumer needs, a business must also stay in
business by making a profit. Although Drucker pointed out that profit is not the purpose
of a business, profits are still the fuel that keeps the machines of business running; thus,
profits are a necessary ingredient in the marketing concept.
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To serve consumers, businesses must be organized internally to do so. The efforts

of a number of functional areas or departments have to be coordinated so that all of
them have the same goal—to create customers by serving the customers’ needs.
When the marketing era evolved in the 1950s, many marketing-oriented
companies, such as P&G, realized they had to change their internal organizational
structure to accommodate their change in corporate strategy from production orientation
to marketing orientation. They went from an organizational structure based on function
(manufacturing, engineering, sales, and distribution) to one arranged by product (Tide,
Crest, Pampers, Charmin, Gillette, and so on).
Thus, a marketing-oriented company will typically organize around its marketing
effort and put those functions that relate directly to marketing under the organizational
wing of marketing—departments such as sales, product design, consumer research,
advertising and promotion, and customer service, for example.
The efforts of marketing-oriented departments are directed toward customer
satisfaction, and more important, customer loyalty. Profit is the reward a business reaps
from satisfied, delighted, loyal customers.
You might have noticed that we have been using the terms “customers” and
“consumers” interchangeably. It is time to clear up that confusion and accurately define
the terms: A customer buys a product, a consumer uses a product. Sometimes a customer
and a consumer are the same person, for example, when a man buys an electric shaver for
himself and uses it. Sometimes they are different people, for example, when a girl says
she wants an iPhone and her mom buys it for her. P&G’s customers are retailers and
their consumers are people who buy Crest. By advertising to consumers and creating
demand for Crest, P&G pulls the product through the distribution system. Some
manufacturers do not advertise their products but sell them to wholesalers who then sell
the product to retailers and, thus, push it through the distribution system. In the media
advertising business, the customer is the advertiser and the consumer is the user, viewer,
reader, or listener.
You will find a more detailed discussion of marketing and marketing strategies in
Chapter 14, because media salespeople must have a deeper understanding of marketing
than is provided here in this introductory section in order to be effective problem solvers
and solutions sellers for the media.
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What Is Advertising?

Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt changed the direction of marketing
with his 1960 article “Marketing Myopia,” and he changed the perception of advertising
ten years later with his article “The Morality (?) of Advertising.” Levitt wrote that “In
curbing the excesses of advertising, both business and government must distinguish
between embellishment and mendacity.” He presents a philosophical treatment of the
human values of advertising as compared with the values of other “imaginative”
disciplines.iv
Levitt defended advertising against critics who would constrain advertising’s
creativity, who want less fluff and more fact in advertising. Many critics of advertising
come from high-income brackets in business and government whose affluence was
generated in industries that either create (advertising agencies) or distribute (the media)
advertising, in industries that have grown through the use of effective advertising, or by
using advertising to promote themselves (politicians). Thus, advertising’s critics must
look carefully at their own glass houses when throwing stones at advertising.
Also, advertising’s critics, Levitt claims, often view the consumer as a helpless,
irrational, gullible couch potato, which is far from the truth. As David Ogilvy, the
advertising genius and practitioner par excellence, wrote to his advertising agency
copywriters in his book, Confessions of an Advertising Man, “the consumer is not an
idiot, she’s your wife.”v Obviously, when Ogilvy made the comment in 1963, most
copywriters were men, which is no longer the case.
Levitt, too, believed that “most people spend their money carefully” and are not
fooled by advertising’s distortions, exaggerations, and deceptions. He writes that rather
than deny that distortion and exaggeration exist in advertising, these properties are among
advertising’s socially desirable purposes. Levitt goes on to say “illegitimacy in
advertising consists only of falsification with larcenous intent.” Levitt’s thesis is that
advertising is like poetry, the purpose of which is “to influence an audience; to affect its
perception and sensibilities; perhaps even to change its mind.” Advertising like art,
makes things prettier. “Who wants reality?”, Levitt asks. When most people get up in
the morning and look at reality in the mirror, they do not like what they see and try to
change it by shaving, using hair gel, or applying makeup. These things give people hope
that they will be better accepted, more attractive and, thus, happier. The goal of the poet,
the artist, and the composer are similar to the goal of an ad – creating images and
feelings. Most advertising, especially on television and in video, is about feelings and
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emotions. It is about trying to make people feel good about a product. Levitt writes that
“Advertisements are the symbols of man’s aspirations.”vi So, Madison Avenue (as the
advertising industry is often referred to), like Hollywood, is selling dreams, and dreams
and hope are essential to people’s well-being.
Google extended the definition of advertising to include search, or keyword,
advertising, that is limited to several lines of copy that includes a link to a website on
which people can buy a searched-for item or get more information. No image making or
branding is involved, yet it is still considered advertising.
Furthermore, advertising develops mass markets for goods, and mass production
reduces the cost of producing these goods. Thus, advertising is a major contributor to
reducing manufacturing costs, search costs, and, ultimately, retail prices. Many products
such as personal computers and eye glasses steadily come down in price as the market for
them grows larger and as manufacturing and distribution savings are passed on to
consumers in the form of competitive pricing. Consumers get information about reduced
prices and increases in features and value through advertising and on websites, by the
way, not via smoke signals.
Advertising is not only an important part of the nation’s economy, but also, as the
nation’s population increases and products proliferate, advertisers and their agencies will
continue to invest more money in the media to reach consumers. You will find a more
detailed discussion of advertising and advertising strategies in Chapter 15, because media
salespeople must have a more in-depth understanding of the principles of advertising than
is provided here in order to be effective sellers of advertising.
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The Media

Advertising is one of the integral elements of the marketing process, just like sales,
product design, promotion, and customer service are. We might look at advertising as the
mass selling of a product. Where is advertising seen or heard? In the media. For the
purposes of this book, the authors will define the media as businesses that are wholly or
in part supported by advertising, e.g. Google, Facebook, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN,
CNN, iHeart Media (radio), the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, the New Yorker. What
business is an advertising agency in? In the advertising creation and placement business.
What business is the media as we have defined it in? The advertising delivery business.
When people talk about the media, they are referring to the distributors of news
and entertainment content -- the Internet, television, newspapers, radio, and magazines.
However, newspapers are not in the news business, magazines are not in the fashion
business, and broadcast and cable television are not in the entertainment business. All of
these media are supported all or in part by advertising and are, therefore, in the
advertising delivery business. The vast majority of media businesses are dependent on
advertising, and advertising, as an integral part of a larger marketing system, is co-
dependent on the media. Without the media to reach large numbers of consumers with an
ad or commercial, marketers would have to go door-to-door and try to sell their goods
one-on-one through personal selling or consumers would have to wander from store to
store or website to website wondering which sold the product they needed – both very
expensive and time-consuming undertakings. Advertising agencies would not exist if
there were no media to run the ads they created.
The reason marketers and advertisers are dependent on the media is because the
media are pervasive and popular with consumers (viewers, readers, listeners) and are
consumers’ link to the global village. People love their media and depend on their
media—their favorite television program, such as “Empire,” their favorite online
platform, such as Instagram, their favorite magazine, such as People, their favorite
country music radio station, or their favorite newspaper, like The Wall Street Journal.
Because of this affection and dependency, the media are actually the most powerful
business in the country – more powerful than the industries, celebrities, politicians they
cover, expose, and glorify.
It is because of this enormous power coupled with a perception that the media
emphasize negative news, poor-quality user generated video, or sex and violence that
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people probably have such a low opinion of the media. Americans seem to blame most
of the ills of society on the media. It is for this reason that we have devoted a separate
chapter in this book to ethics. Chapter 3 emphasizes the importance for salespeople to
deal with customers ethically, because the reputation of the media is at stake, and that
reputation needs to be improved.
One of the roles of the media is to expose consumers to advertising, not to
guarantee sales or results to advertisers. The media are just that – a medium, a
connection between advertisers and customers. There are signs in radio station in
Branson, MO, for example, that read “Our purpose is to bring our audience and
advertisers together,” which is exactly what Google’s search advertising does. When
asked in an interview in a national business magazine what the radio business was all
about, Lowry Mays, founder of Clear Channel Communications (now iHeart Media),
replied, “To help people sell more Fords.” These signs and statements reinforce the
notion that most of the media are in the advertising delivery business.
In most of the world’s countries, the media are supported and controlled by
government; however, the media in the United States are kept free from government
control and interference because of advertising support. The mass media from which the
American public gets the vast majority of their information and entertainment are free or
relatively inexpensive because they are supported by advertising. If Google were not
supported by advertising, people would have to pay a few cents for each search. If
Instagram were not free, people would have to pay for posting a picture of their steaming
lobster dinner. A daily newspaper that costs fifty cents at a newsstand would cost perhaps
ten dollars were it not for the advertising, plus the newspaper would be much less
desirable and useful for consumers if it contained no ads, no movie or theater listings, or
no bargains for price-conscious shoppers.
Finally, in spite of a love-hate relationship between the public and the media, or
perhaps because of it, most media companies are quite profitable. Many of the great
fortunes in the in the world have been built in the media, especially the digital media (e.g.
Google, Facebook, BuzzFeed). Even if new products do not survive in the marketplace,
the media still receive the advertising dollars invested to introduce the product, just as the
media get the advertising revenue from political candidates who eventually lose. The
profit margins in the media are, as rule, higher than in most other industries. Facebook’s
quarterly profit margins are often higher than 50 percent. Top-rated radio and television
stations in major markets often have profit margins of 40 percent or greater. Newspapers
in large markets are usually monopolies or close to it because of joint operating
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agreements, although print newspaper profit margins have been virtually non-existent in
recent years and newspapers’ financial futures, as do those of magazines, typically
depend on revenue growth from their digital editions if sold on a cross-platform basis.
The reason for these profit margins is because in an advertising-supported
medium such as Google, Facebook, radio, television, digital newspapers, and digital
magazines, the cost of adding an additional ad has no or very low incremental costs
involved. For example, in television, the time for commercials is baked into most
programming, so if a commercial is not scheduled in a commercial pod, a promotion or
public service announcement will run. A television station does not expand the
programming time if it does not have commercials to run. Thus, at a television station, it
costs nothing to add a commercial – there are no incremental costs involved. On the
other hand, if an automotive manufacturer sells a car, it has to build one with all of the
concomitant costs involved (labor, materials, transportation, etc.). Once a radio or
television station has sold enough advertising to cover its cost of operations and debt
payment, if any, all additional advertising sold is virtually 100 percent profit. In digital
newspapers and digital magazines, which often have an additional revenue stream, that of
subscriptions, once the cost of operating is recovered, the incremental cost of adding an
ad is very low in comparison to the cost of an ad to an advertiser.

What this profitable economic model means for salespeople is that advertising
revenue is extremely profitable and, therefore, there is more money to distribute to
salespeople in the form of compensation than in less profitable industries. Media
salespeople are among the highest paid of any industry.

Test Yourself

1. In the era of marketing, what is the primary focus?

2. Why are consumer orientation, profit, and internal organization important to the
marketing concept?
3. What is the difference between a customer and a consumer?
4. Is advertising distorted and exaggerated? If so, what do you think Theodore Levitt
might say about this contention?
5. What business is the ad-supported media in?
6. Why are the media potentially so profitable?
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Project

Make a list of all of the local media in your market: radio stations, television stations,
cable systems, newspapers (daily, weekly, shoppers, suburban, ethnic, etc.), local
magazines or journals (local business journals, e.g.), outdoor companies, bus or subway
posters, yellow pages, and local websites that sell advertising. Interview one or two sales
managers or advertising directors of some of the media that have revenue in addition to
advertising (newspapers subscriptions or a website’s e-commerce, for example) and get a
rough estimate of what percentage of revenue comes from advertising and what
percentage comes from other revenue sources such as subscriptions. Then write some
notes about what surprised you in this exercise.

References
Peter Drucker. 1954. The Practice of Management, New York: Harper & Row.
Levitt, Theodore. 1960. “Marketing myopia,” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug.
Levitt, Theodore. 1970. “The morality (?) of advertising,” Harvard Business Review,
July-Aug.
David Ogilvy. 1989. Confessions of an Advertising Man 2nd Edition, New York:
Atheneum.
Smith, Mike. 2015. Targeted: How Technology Is Revolutionizing Advertising and the
Way Companies Reach Consumers. New York: AMACOM.
Stewart, Thomas A. and O’Connell, Patricia. 2016. Woo, Wow, and Win: Service
Design, Strategy and the Art of Consumer Delight. New York: Harper Business.

Resources
www.adage.com (Advertising Age)
www.mediapost.com (Daily updates about all of the media and media research)
www.iab.com (Interactive Advertising Bureau)
www.oaaa.org (Outdoor Advertising Association of America)
www.rab.com (Radio Advertising Bureau)
www.tvb.org (Television Bureau of Advertising)
www.thevab.com (Video Advertising Bureau)
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Notes

i
Peter F. Drucker. 1954. The Practice of Management. New York: Harper & Row.
ii
Levitt, Theodore. 1960. “Marketing myopia,” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug.
iii
Smith, Mike. 2015. Targeted: How Technology Is Revolutionizing Advertising and the Way Companies
Reach Consumers. New York: AMACOM.
iv
Levitt, Theodore. 1970. “The morality (?) of advertising,” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug.
v
David Ogilvy. 1989. Confessions of an Advertising Man 2nd Edition, New York: Atheneum.
vi
Levitt, Theodore. 1970. “The morality (?) of advertising,” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug.